On their part men, especially American, try to find in a spouse across the ocean a mild and restrained girlfriend, a good mother and a housewife. The lucky ones say that in search of traditional values they eventually had to refer to the help of marriage agencies. They are sure that in a marriage American women only look for the satisfaction of their own ambitious and career-oriented plans, they are not good enough as wives and mothers, whereas foreign ladies are happy in the role of home keeper and do not need much more than a husband, a family and a home. Whether this is actually true is a controversial point, but such is the opinion of American men.
The Service of Immigration and Naturalization carried out a survey, during which 607 American men searching for wives through marriage agencies were questioned. Only 206 have responded to written requests. 94% of them turned out to be white Americans with higher education (50% have two or more years of college). They support rather conservative views in politics and ideology and are quite successful financially (64% earned more than $20,000 a year, and 42% occupied managing positions). The average age of these men was 37 years, they represented 44 states, 22% were from California, 84% - inhabitants of large cities.
However, from 30 " mail order marriages", contracted in 1986-1993, only in two the spouses were approximately of the same age (4-6 years of difference). In the remaining 28 age difference was from 20 to 50(!) years. At the same time the older men preferred women who were not very clever and educated, those who could still be "brought up".
How successful is mail correspondence? There is no exact answer to this question. Many of the agencies involved in marriage business could not present any data on the number of marriages contracted and their duration in reply to the inquiry of SIN. Exact statistics were presented by the agency Encounters International that has been working since 1993. During five years 2500 women appeared in its lists (450 of them from Russia). 102 marriages were contracted, i.e. only 4% of the women who applied have found American husbands.
According to the data submitted by the USA Population Census Office in the end of June 1998, 2,395,000 marriages were registered in the USA during 12 preceding months (1,154,000 divorces in the same period), from which 4-6 thousand marriages were facilitated by the international marriage agencies (0.21% of the total number). The agencies themselves assure that the divorce rate in their marriages is much lower than in general in the USA. 80% of these marriages have been observed for several years.
According to the statistics of SIN, during 1994-1996 more than 800,000 immigrants entered the USA each year, 18% of them - as spouses of citizens of the USA (in 1996 this figure accounted for 169,760 of the total number of immigrants - 915,900). 14% (130,000) of the total number of immigrants are parents and children of citizens of the USA.